Fry Me a River
Have you ever dreamed of operating your very own 1960s-style drive-in? Me neither, but if I change my mind, I’ll call the number on the “For Lease” sign in the window of Clem’s Drive-In (10802 East 23rd Street) in Independence.
After 40 years serving loose-meat sandwiches, cherry milkshakes and batter-fried pork-loin sandwiches, the latest owners of Clem’s — Brett Gilbert and his mother, Grace White — have emptied the deep fryer and laid off the carhops. The low-slung concrete-block building had been an Independence institution since the Monkees topped the charts with “I’m a Believer.”
My friend Jeanne, an Independence native, was heartbroken over the news about her favorite childhood restaurant. “I would go there with my parents, my little dog Sugarbabe and my Aunt Virginia. All of us ordered loose-meat burgers except Aunt Virginia, who ate fried-brain sandwiches.”
Actually, those pork-brain sandwiches were what made Clem’s famous. I tasted one seven years ago, but only after the carhop assured me that the kitchen crew “boiled the brains real good” before battering them and plunging them into hot oil. It wasn’t the tastiest sandwich I’d ever eaten, but I vastly preferred it to the pork-snout sandwich I had timidly tasted the same summer, doing research for our Best Of issue.
But Clem’s had a more recent claim to fame. One of the drive-in’s former employees was carhop Sarah Everson, who clearly wasn’t using her brain — pork or otherwise — when she decided to tell one whopper of a lie. Last spring, Everson and her husband announced that she had given birth to sextuplets. After lots of publicity and thousands of dollars in cash donations, the Eversons ‘fessed up that there were no babies. It had all been a hoax to pay off a few bills.
I was hoping that Clem’s demise was also a hoax, so I drove to Independence last week, and, yep, there was the “For Lease” sign. I mourned quietly, then drove a few blocks east to 700 East 23rd Street and polished off two Whiz Burgers, onion rings and a frosty mug of homemade brew at the legendary Mugs Up Root Beer Drive-In.
